Umphrey’s McGee Lets Fans Text Requests During Interactive UMBowl

Umphree's McGee, seen here onstage in 2009, will let fans text in song requests during the annual UMBowl show.Photo: Chad Smith

Fans attending UMBowl, the annual concert put on by Chicago band Umphrey’s McGee, will be able to steer the show by texting song requests in real time and suggesting themes for musical improvisation.

“When I was a kid going to see music, people would hold up poster boards and sheets and whatnot with things painted on them when they wanted to request a song,” said Kevin Browning, manager of creative and business development for the band. “My thought was that there had to be a better way to get your voice heard.”

The fan-driven nature of UMBowl, which will take place Friday in the jam band’s hometown, gives Umphrey’s McGee a chance to show off its improvisatory skills, according to Browning, who said he came up for the idea with the band’s members. It also brings the type of large-scale, smartphone-powered interactive experience usually deployed in massive stadiums down to the club level.

The Umphrey’s McGee concert will stay true to its sport-themed name by having four separate quarters of music, each with a different theme. There’s an “All Request Quarter,” another for improv based on themes, a “Choose Your Own Adventure” quarter during which the audience picks the set list in real time, and a final quarter when fans can pick their favorite improv numbers.

The text-messaging gambit, similar to the tweet requests Jay-Z took during his show at South By Southwest recently, is used mostly to let audience members make requests for songs or improv themes.

Someone behind the scenes will go through incoming fan texts and display them on screens in the concert hall for the band to see and play. During the “Choose Your Own Adventure” quarter, a screen will pop up with three song choices, from which the band will choose.

The texting technology comes from Mozes, a company that typically facilitates mobile-powered interactive experiences at big music venues and also handles those “Text COKEZERO to … ” billboard messages that flash during sporting events.

“[Mozes] didn’t design their platform to do this,” Browning said of the small-venue deployment at UMBowl, which happens Friday at Chicago club Park West. “What they typically do is, when you go see a show they’ll have screens up ahead of time, before the artist starts, where people can text in, ‘I’m so excited to see Britney!'”

The idea sprang from a desire to fuse music and tech in a way that hadn’t been done before, he said. “My thought was, ‘Why not take that piece of technology and incorporate it into the show?'”